On the Sunny Side of the Street

It all starts with the story of Katya — a girl starving during the Siege of Leningrad. Katya is saved thanks to evacuation to relatively safe Tashkent, which became a second home for thousands of Soviet citizens fleeing from the Nazi invasion. As a girl, Katya enters the criminal underworld of Tashkent, becoming a talented con artist and "working" in the Tashkent markets. Later, out of wedlock, she gives birth to a daughter, Vera. Little Vera is unaware of her mother’s business... The girl grows up surrounded by people of various nationalities — Russians, Uzbeks, Jews, Ukrainians... One day, she saves a drunkard, whom she calls Uncle Misha, and it is he who recognizes her artistic talent and begins to nurture it. Later, Vera survives the devastating Tashkent earthquake of 1966 and becomes a world-renowned artist.
The fates of the characters in the novel are peculiar, intertwined in a "high-voltage" plot where love and crime, talent and passion capable of destroying a personality or elevating it to the heights of creativity merge.
Open this novel — and you will not be released from a truly Babylonian assembly of types: urban lunatics and alcoholics, Russian nobles, exiles and released prisoners, "white colonizers" and "hashish hunters"…